Page 161 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

HAIL 141
that way for you and me—because we arc slaves, not because it is
not the right, the natural way-when the passions of the body
flame and melt into the passions of the spirit-in those dream
ccstacics so rarely found by any human creature, those, as you say,
whom God hath really joined — In some divine moment we might
reach it - the ccstacy. We never shall. But there is left so much.
As you say my dear, wise Queen —all that there is we will take.*
‘It’s the last letter. There is so much to say ... Tell yourself the
thousand things that you would hear and I tell. If I can content
you let me do it. If you want me let me be there, the litde things,
the big things, say them all... But now you are at Hail. Now we’ll
go back to that court of your heart... ’
But it was not the last letter. As the weeks went by he wrote
every day or two and the letters piled up along her route.
‘I cannot tell you how much it moves me to hear you say—No,
not that — to see it written by you, that you might have married
me, have borne my children, have been my life as well as my
heart...’
Again: ‘You give me a new world, Gertrude. I have often
loved women as a man like me does love them, well and badly,
little and much, as the blood took me, or the time or the invita­
tion, or simply for the adventure—to see what happened. But
that is all behind me.’
‘And you shall walk in my garden, even ghostwise and imper­
fect in this life—and I will walk in yours, ghostwise also, and still
more imperfectly.’
January 15th: ‘Already it seems a long time since I wrote...
This morning they wrote to me to go to Abyssinia, and I am
going about the end of the month ... Where are you now? By the
Belka castles, working like ten men, tired and hungry and
sleepy ... Like that I love to think of you: sometimes, too, (but
it’s beastly of me) I love to think of you lonely, and wanting
me ... ’
In the last week of January Doughty-Wylie called at Sloane
Street where he met Gertrude’s father. Then he went to the
Foreign Office to an interview with Sir Edward Grey. He was due
to leave London for Addis Ababa in a few days. ‘Yet go I must...
There’s anarchy out there, complete and beastly. Thesiger has
gone away to East Africa. I go to Kartoum and Cairo to see K
[Kitchener] and Wingate. Perhaps I can hear in Cairo. Your
father will let me know, dear old man ... ’